Cardboard Box: Ericsson to cut more workers

So, I still have it, hoping that one day Ericsson will realise its mistake and take back its name and phone business.

But with 5,000 jobs gone last year and an announcement this morning that a further 1,500 are to go, things are looking bleak.

Ericsson has reported that its last quarter's profits fell 92% as against Q4 2008.

The company is still struggling to "restructure." But its sales are down by 13% as companies such as HTC eat into their market share, en passant to challenging Nokia.

Perhaps there is a lesson: some people would rather pay for service on their old phones than buy a new one. If they are forced to buy a new one, then brand loyalty appears to be out of the window.

And there's another lesson - at a meeting about the expected need to replace several of our mobiles only this morning, several views came up that the mobile industry will no doubt regard as heresy:

1. I'm not having a Blackberry and I'm not using my mobile for e-mail. I give enough of my life to my job as it is.

2. Our French people aren't allowed mobile e-mail in case they work outside the 35 hour weekly limit

3. I don't want a camera, I don't want an MP3 player and I don't want a voice recorder: I have all of them and I have the ones I choose not one someone bundled into my phone.

4. Can't I have a phone that makes calls reliably even when coverage is dodgy?

5. Can I have a battery that lasts properly and doesn't give me endless hours of standby but almost no talk time.

One person wanted web browsing, but said that it wasn't really necessary. No one cared about Bluetooth or infra-red.

So what does it mean?

Answer: they may not have known its name, but what everyone described was the T39m - albeit with 3G added to ensure global coverage - but it's a triband and works in most places anyway. And it has a browser (rudimentary, it's true), bluetooth and infrared.

There's got to be a message there.

And if that deficit's too much to bear, I'm still waiting to be able to pay to get mine fixed.

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Nigel Morris-Cotterill is Head, The Anti Money Laundering Network. As an early adopter of all things tech. he's become jaundiced with fashion masquerading as value or progress. Now he just wants stuff that does what he needs and works all the time.

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Visit www.acardboardboxifyourelucky.com if you or a friend are leaving your job.